Authors: Lisa Childs
“Please,” Amber said. “Don’t...”
The woman shook her head. “Tell him to leave with me. To play nicely and maybe everything will be all right.”
Just as Patricia had refused to believe her, Amber couldn’t trust her, either. She hadn’t gone to the lengths she had to let her and Michael live.
No. Nothing would ever be all right again. She couldn’t let Patricia Schievink leave with her son—because if she did, she would never see him again.
Not alive...
* * *
She should have killed Amber—should have pulled the trigger. But there had been witnesses in the park—people who would have been able to testify against her. Nobody but Amber had seen her gun. The little boy hadn’t even seen it as Patricia had held it behind his back. She could have shot him there—in front of his mother. Could have had her revenge then.
Finally.
But maybe this was better. Amber would suffer now—worrying whether her son was dead or alive. She wouldn’t be able to sleep. To eat.
Just as Patricia hadn’t been able to when Gregory had worked late with that slut. She’d imagined the two of them together—laughing at her. Thinking her too stupid to know what was going on between them.
The only reason Gregory hadn’t asked her for a divorce was because of her money. He was too ambitious to give that up—knowing she would be able to finance his bid for mayor. For governor.
For president. He’d had such aspirations.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” she asked the little boy. Not that she would ever give him the chance. She just wondered...
“I want to be a bodyguard,” he said, “like my daddy.”
Gregory was the boy’s father. She’d heard him say it himself.
Why were Amber Talsma and her son claiming that it was another man? Why were they denying Gregory?
“Your daddy is a bodyguard?” Patricia asked the child.
He nodded his blond head. In the photos Frank Campanelli had sent her, the boy’s hair had looked darker—more like Gregory’s. And she didn’t remember ever noticing how light his eyes were, how they were nearly silver...
Gregory’s eyes had been dark. And the woman’s were green again. Not dark like those photos Frank had sent.
No. She was letting Amber Talsma get to her. And she, of all people, knew better than to trust a lawyer. They were natural liars. Gregory had always been a liar. All those promises he’d made her.
To be faithful.
To love her forever...
Amber had to be lying.
Because why would Gregory have claimed the boy was his if he wasn’t...?
Had it just been wishful thinking?
Amber had been sleeping with both men, and Gregory had just assumed her child was his. Had Amber played Gregory?
She laughed at the irony of the ultimate player being fooled. And the boy looked at her nervously.
“When’s my mommy coming?” he asked.
“Whenever she figures out where we are,” she said. “Is she very good at hide-and-seek?”
The little boy giggled. “No. I always win.”
This time Patricia would win. Amber had given her the perfect revenge when she’d told her that she wouldn’t survive losing her son.
That was why Patricia hadn’t shot her in the park. She had waited too long for her revenge for it to be over so quickly. No. This was better. So much better...
Amber would suffer. She would suffer wondering where her son was—if he was alive. If he was dead...
And when she found him...
She would suffer for the rest of her miserable life.
All Patricia had to do was pull the trigger. Frank Campanelli hadn’t thought she could do it, but she’d proved him wrong. She had had no problem taking his life.
And she would have no problem taking another...
Chapter 24
A
mber couldn’t stop shaking. Her muscles quivered uncontrollably. “I shouldn’t have let her take him. I shouldn’t have let her...”
She’d prosecuted so many cases where nothing good happened if a suspect got a victim to a second location—to somewhere private. Somewhere horrible things would happen.
What was Patricia doing to her son? Their son...
Milek’s face was flushed with fury, his hands fisted at his sides. He was probably angry with her. She didn’t blame him; she was angry with herself.
“I shouldn’t have...”
“You couldn’t risk that she might pull the trigger,” Milek said—as if he understood.
Tears overflowed her eyes again and cracked her voice. “She had it right at the back of his head...”
Brad Jipping had shot himself in the head. Milek had caught her in his arms, had tried to stop her from seeing it. But he hadn’t been fast enough. She’d seen the horror...
And that was what she had immediately imagined when she’d seen that gun so close to her son’s head.
She blinked, trying to clear her vision, so she could focus on Milek. There were others in the condo. Agent Rus was there—along with every member of the Payne Protection Agency and their spouses. But Milek was the only one she needed.
“Will we get him back?” she asked. “Will we ever see our son again?”
He nodded. “Of course we will.” He moved closer and slid his arm around her shaking shoulders. She didn’t deserve it—not after failing to protect their son, but he was offering her comfort. “If she’d intended to hurt him, she would have shot him in the park. In front of you.”
Remembering what she’d told the woman, she shook her head. “No...”
“What?”
“I gave her the perfect revenge,” she admitted. “I was talking about Jipping and I said I wouldn’t survive losing my son...”
There was no way Patricia had missed that, no way she wouldn’t take advantage of the situation. Which meant Amber would never see her son again.
Not alive...
* * *
Amber was blaming herself. But it was Milek’s fault. He shouldn’t have let them go alone to the park. He’d known something wasn’t right.
He’d still been on edge. He’d thought it was because he’d been worried that she was leaving—or already gone. But it hadn’t made sense that Brad Jipping had had the money to hire Frank Campanelli. With his drinking problem, the man hadn’t been able to hold a job. He’d lost his home. And his vehicle had been repossessed.
Those hundred-dollar bills. The ones he’d given to the kid to drive the battered truck and the ones on his table—those weren’t Jipping’s. They must have belonged to Patricia Schievink.
She had plenty of money. Enough to have hired Frank Campanelli to kill her husband and Amber and Michael. Enough money to have hired Jipping to finish the job the hired assassin had failed to carry out.
She must have known about the case from her husband. They had talked about his work. About Amber...
Patricia Schievink had enough money to get out of the country and never come back. So why had she brought Michael here?
The house was smaller than the mansion in which she lived now—in front of which the hit man she’d hired had gunned down her husband. The front door of the little brick Cape Cod was locked, but she might as well not have bothered, since Milek picked it so quickly.
As he pushed it open and stepped inside, the hardwood floor creaked beneath his weight. But that was the only sound inside the house. The only movement but for the dust particles dancing in the sunshine pouring through the bare windows. He could see through the windows to where the woman sat in the backyard with a child playing on an old swing set.
He pushed open the sliding door and stepped outside to join them. His quiet movements had been a waste of time.
Michael pumped his legs harder to carry his swing higher. “Daddy!” he called out as he waved. Then he turned toward the woman sitting on a rusted lawn chair in the middle of a patio overgrown with weeds. “Daddy found me. He’s good at hide-and-seek.”
She didn’t turn around to look; she must have trusted his son. “How did you find me?” she asked.
“You didn’t turn off your cell phone.”
“It brought you right to this house?”
“This block,” Milek admitted. “The property records confirmed you still own this house. Actually, Gregory owns it still.”
“He bought it when he asked me to marry him,” she said. “Probably to convince me that he wasn’t marrying me for my money.” She snorted at that—as if embarrassed she hadn’t known better. “He said it had a great yard for kids to play in.”
Michael had moved to the slide of the old swing set. Milek wanted to reach for the boy, but the woman sat between them, the barrel of the gun she held pointed toward the boy.
“It is a great yard,” he said but hoped that agreeing with Gregory didn’t upset her. While she once must have loved the man, in the end she’d hated him enough to have him killed.
“But we could never have kids,” she continued.
“Is that why you took my son?” he asked.
She sighed. “He is yours, isn’t he?”
Milek nodded. “Yes. You heard Schievink tell me that he was the father of Amber’s baby?”
Schievink had called him to that mansion he’d bought with his wife’s money. Milek had wondered if she’d been home then or if it had been a member of the staff he’d heard moving around in the hall outside Schievink’s home office. But she hadn’t come to her husband’s aid when Milek had struck the smug son of a bitch.
“Yes...”
“He lied,” Milek said. She couldn’t see, but he pointed at his son. “It’s obvious the boy is mine.” And Milek never should have believed the man—not even for a moment. He never should have doubted Amber. She loved him.
Did she still? Would she be able to love him if he failed to save their son?
“Why did you stay with him?” he asked. “Why didn’t you divorce him then?” Or kill him?
She shrugged. “I still loved him. And he didn’t leave me then.”
“He was going to leave you last year?”
She nodded. “I found his plane ticket. One way to an island near Bermuda. I figured she was going with him. He was leaving me.”
So she had hired Frank Campanelli to kill her husband.
“He was fleeing,” Milek said, “the country, not you. He must have known it was only a matter of time before Agent Rus discovered he was corrupt.”
“Corrupt?” she repeated. And she laughed now. “That’s ridiculous. I gave Gregory everything he wanted—all the money he needed.”
“Maybe it wasn’t for money that he bent the law,” Milek said. “Maybe it was for power—influence. Or just because he was a liar and a cheat.”
She released another shaky sigh. “He was a son of a bitch, wasn’t he?”
“Yes,” Milek heartily agreed. He’d let the man affect his life—affect his relationship with Amber and with his son. “He sure was...”
“He deserved to die,” she said, as if rationalizing what she’d done. What she’d had Frank Campanelli do for her. “Even if he wasn’t leaving me for her, he was leaving me.”
“He wasn’t leaving you for her,” Milek insisted. “Amber was never involved with him.”
“You believe her?”
“Yes.”
Patricia’s slender shoulders slumped with defeat. But she didn’t let go of the gun. She didn’t move the gun barrel away from where the boy played.
“Frank Campanelli lied,” she said. “He claimed he caused that accident. But he’d known all along she and the little boy were alive. He waited until he needed money to let me know he hadn’t completed that job.”
“Maybe he couldn’t bring himself to hurt an innocent woman and an innocent child.” He hoped she couldn’t, either.
“He was lazy,” she said. “And greedy. He was a horrible man who killed so many people.”
“I know. We found a book he kept of all the names of his victims.”
She shuddered. “He deserved to die, too.”
“Yes,” he agreed. He moved closer to her then. And as he feared, she tightened her grasp on the gun. He could kill her; he had his gun out.
But her safety was off. She might fire the gun when he hit her. And her bullet could hit his son. He couldn’t risk it. And maybe he didn’t need to...
“My son doesn’t deserve to die,” he told her. As he knelt beside her chair, he holstered his gun.
He should have wanted to kill her—for the terror she had put Amber and Michael through. And because she held a gun, it would have been self-defense. Instead he took that gun from her shaking hand and closed his arms around her as she fell apart.
She clung to him, weeping. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry. I just couldn’t lose him to her. I couldn’t lose him. I loved him too much. I loved him too much...”
Milek doubted she had loved her husband at all. Because if you loved someone, you did what was best for them—even if it was letting them go.
He’d done it once. He’d done what was best for Amber. Now he had to do it again. He had to put aside his wants and his needs and let her go.
He couldn’t be as selfish as Patricia Schievink had been. He had to do the right thing.
For Amber...
* * *
Nick had been behind the glass of that interrogation room with Milek Kozminski. He’d heard the same nonsense Milek had—about his reputation ruining Amber Talsma’s chances of ever becoming River City’s next district attorney. He couldn’t deny the Kozminskis were notorious.
But maybe it was time they were notorious for the right reasons. Maybe it was time they were known as the men they really were. Not the criminals.
But the heroes.
“What the hell is this?” Milek asked as he read the commendation Nick had written up for him and on which the mayor had signed off—thanks to some pressure from Chief Special Agent Woodrow Lynch.
Nick shrugged. “I got sick of everyone giving me the accolades for bringing down Chekov. You did more work than I did on that case. And you solved this latest case completely on your own.”
Milek dropped the paper on his kitchen counter and snorted. “If Amber hadn’t called Patricia Schievink to meet her at the park, we might never have solved it.”
“That crazy bitch would have tried again,” Nick said. “It wasn’t Amber’s fault.”
“Tell her that,” Milek said.
“Haven’t you?”
Milek shrugged. “She moved out of the condo. I haven’t talked to her since I brought Michael back to her.”
Fool.
Sure, Nick knew Milek thought he was doing the right thing. But for the wrong damn reasons...